Free The Turning Season by Sharon Shinn

kill a human being. And when you’re a cop, you have to be prepared to take a life. So I turned in my badge.”
    The story makes me like him even more. I’m all in favor of less killing, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to say that that doesn’t sound hokey. “And why’d you leave Joliet for Quinville?”
    â€œWell, there wasn’t a reason to stay in Joliet anymore,” he replies.The way he says it makes me think something besides the job had gone sour. A relationship, maybe. “And my buddy said I could drive for him till I figured out what else to do, so Quinville seemed as good a place as any.”
    â€œAnd has it been?”
    His round face creases into an expression of equivocation. “I guess it could be,” he says. “But so far I kind of feel like I’m just marking time.”
    I can understand that. I’m familiar with the sensation of being poised on the edge of tomorrow, always anticipating the big event that will give shape and meaning to the following days. “Yeah, but you know what they say. Life is what happens while you’re waiting for life to happen.”
    He wrinkles his nose in dissent. “I always thought that was kind of dumb.”
    I laugh. “Well, my
point
is, you shouldn’t waste too much time, or it will all be gone before you’ve accomplished anything.”
    â€œThanks for the cheerful thought.”
    â€œYeah, you can see why I’m not exactly the type of person to be hanging out at bars frittering my time away.”
    â€œSo what about you?” he asks. “What brought you to Quinville? Or were you born here?”
    The true story would pop the eyes right out of his head, but I can tell a well-honed variant. “Nope, I grew up in Barrington. Kind of a ritzy suburb outside of Chicago. My dad was an art dealer and he was always going to little small-town art gallery openings, trying to find the next, I don’t know, Thomas Hart Benton or John Singer Sargent. And a few years ago, he went to a gallery in Champaign and met an artist named Cooper Blair, and he
loved
his stuff. So my dad started repping him, and our families became friends. Cooper lived with Janet, who ran a veterinary clinic off of Highway W. I used to spend summers working with her, and then I took classes, and then I took over the business when Janet decided to retire.” I shake my head, as if I’m still surprised by the vagaries of life. “I mean, I never would have thought I’d be happy living out in the middle of
nowhere
, but I find the life suits me.”
    â€œYou don’t miss the big city?”
    â€œWell, Barrington’s pretty far out from downtown Chicago. It’s not like I was down at the Loop every night, anyway.”
    â€œDo you go back much? Visit your family?”
    â€œMy parents are both dead.”
    His face instantly changes. “Aw, I’m sorry to hear that. That must be tough.”
    I nod and don’t answer. Because of course it’s tough. I still miss my father every day; he was such a large, powerful presence in my life. Smart and forceful and utterly determined. Once he set his sights on something, he invariably achieved it. He’s the one who convinced Janet to open the clinic here—he picked out the property, he paid for it, he helped furnish it. He believed that our small circle of shape-shifting friends needed a haven, a place where they could come for rest and healing, and he was going to see that place built if he had to put it together with his own hands.
    Well. He really thought
I
needed a refuge. I was in my hormone-fueled teens then, and taking on bigger and wilder shapes every few days, and he was deeply afraid for me. Barrington isn’t downtown Chicago, that’s true, but it’s a highly developed urban setting, and it’s hard to hide an elephant on your back lawn. He was happy enough to found a clinic for the shape-shifting